


When You're Ready

by dancingpenguin57



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: And a little bit of angst, Canon Compliant, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Fluff, Force Bond (Star Wars), Post-Canon, Soft Reylo is canon, Tumblr: reylofanfictionanthology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-09-26 01:42:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17132657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancingpenguin57/pseuds/dancingpenguin57
Summary: What do they have to offer each other, now that they're no longer at war?





	When You're Ready

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inthegrayworld](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inthegrayworld/gifts).



> Two things to know:
> 
> 1\. These scenes take place after a year-long war between the First Order and the Resistance. During the last few weeks Ben allied with the Resistance (read: Rey) and facilitated negotiations between the two parties that ended the war. That's literally all I know about the politics in this scenario. They're not really relevant.
> 
> 2\. Ben Solo is a _nerd_.

_You know how to find me. When you’re ready, I’ll be waiting._

The message was beautifully crisp and clear on the first night. The edges of the thick white paper were perfectly square and sharp enough to slice her skin, and the letters were so precise that they appeared machine-printed even under close inspection (though Rey knew -- could _feel_ , somehow -- that they had been penned by hand).

‘I’m ready,’ Rey thought to herself. ‘I’m ready, and you owe me an explanation.’

She thought the same thing on the second night, and the third, and on the night that the corners of the note began to fray and curl in on themselves. She was definitely thinking it the night she noticed that the black ink had lost its glossy sheen. She thought it over and over each time she traced her fingers over the letters, watching as they slowly bled and blurred into the grain of the paper. Through all of this Rey remained completely ready, and completely unable to proceed.

Until tonight.

There wasn’t anything particularly special about this night. She had spent the day with Rose and Artoo in their (slightly illegal) tech lab underneath the new Senate building. While they ate dinner Finn made Rey laugh so hard that she was sure she inhaled a granadilla seed. She stood in the refresher for a long time after she was clean, marvelling at the way that the steady stream of water caused her fingertips to wrinkle. Dozens of days had passed exactly like this one since the treaties were signed.

But tonight, after the small apartment became quiet and dark and Rey was certain she was the only one still awake, she slipped out from under her covers and sat cross-legged on the floor in the middle of her bedroom.

Lowering the barrier between them was heartbreakingly simple. It was a remarkable sensation, to suddenly be aware of the tension that must have been strung through every cell of her body since the Battle of Crait, but that she hadn’t allowed herself to notice until this moment. She released it all now with a sharp burst of potent relief; and her lungs expanded for the first time in _too long_ ; and Ben Solo was sitting in front of her.

He was on the floor, too. His long legs were splayed out in front of him, taking up an obscene amount of space, and although she could only see the one book he held in his hands Rey imagined that he had dozens of others strewn about him.

He was looking right at her, even though he couldn’t possibly have anticipated her arrival. He closed his book -- slowly, as if worried that a sudden movement would frighten her away -- and set it aside.

“I was beginning to think you wouldn’t come.”

“Oh. Well. I’m here.”

A beat of silence passed. And then another. It was an awkward sort of silence, and Rey hated it -- absolutely _hated_ it -- because she had prepared herself for the possibility of her worst fear coming to life, but she had hoped that it might wait at least a few minutes before making itself inescapable.

Because the reason that she had avoided this moment wasn’t related to any deep-seated philosophical conundrums. Her indecision had nothing to do with politics, or trust, or a potential clash of ideologies. Rey’s reputation as the Jedi Heir had amassed her a small following of devotees who tried, from afar, to ascribe spiritual meaning to every decision she had made during the war and the reformation that followed it; but if they ever saw inside her head they would find that her concerns were far more mundane.

_What if he doesn’t like me?_

_What if I don’t like him?_

_What do we have to offer each other, now that we’re no longer at war?_

Rey traced out the Aurebesh alphabet on her knee, hoping for a burst of guiding inspiration.

“Where are you?” she asked, at the same time that he asked “How are you?”

A beat.

“I’m good.” / “I’m on Naboo.”

“Oh.” / “Good.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

“How are you going, with that?” she gestured vaguely with her chin toward the cloth-bound book tucked next to his thigh.

(She had given it to him after the last treaty was signed, explaining that neither she nor C-3PO could decipher the ancient language it was written in. Rey remembered it perfectly, because Ben had _smiled_ , and in that moment she had been sure that he would stay.

She had found the note three hours later.)

Ben leaned to one side, still moving with slow caution, and pulled a handful of unbound papers seemingly out of thin air. “I’ve managed meaningful translations of the first few pages, as well as a number of other scattered passages. But it’s slow work, and it will take time to go through the entire text. Months.”

Rey was impressed, but she wasn’t sure if they had the sort of relationship that involved simple compliments, so she just nodded.

After several moments he seemed to decide that she wasn’t going to say anything more. He turned his attention back to the translation, alternating between peering closely at the book and writing notes. Rey stared at the wall above his head and gnawed at her bottom lip.

She inhaled deeply. “This was big, you know. This decision. To let you in.”

Ben returned his attention to her, pushing the book aside again. It was almost maddening, how patient he seemed.

“I understand.”

“I think… that’s big enough for one day.”

Ben nodded. He mimicked her posture by crossing his own legs, but leant his forearms on his knees, drawing his face a handbreadth nearer to hers. It shouldn’t have made much of a difference -- he was still too far away to reach out and touch her -- but the movement was a roaring reminder that he could come closer, if he wanted. If she wanted.

“We can take a break,” he suggested, “and pick up again on another day.”

Rey nodded and dissolved the connection between them without further comment. She managed, with difficulty, to get back into bed. Her heart was thumping so forcefully that she was worried it might reverberate through the walls and wake up Finn in the next room, so she pulled the bedcovers up to her chin to smother it as best she could.

… … …

The next night Rey only spent four minutes in the refresher. Her fingertips were smooth and supple when she sat on the bedroom floor and reached inside herself to find him.

Ben smiled at her. But Rey had come prepared with a mission, a plan, a need, and she wouldn’t allow any dimples or slightly crooked teeth to disarm her.

“Why did you leave?” she demanded, firmly, exactly the way she had practiced in her mind that morning, while she had been pretending to listen to yet another one of Snap’s speeches.

“I didn’t lea--” He paused. His brow creased. “I didn’t leave _you_. I _can’t_ leave you. I thought you would understand that. I left you a note.” The last few words were a bit feeble. “Did you see it?”

Rey bit her lip to hold in a half-delirious bark of laughter. “Yeah,” she said, gulping. “Yeah, I’ve seen it.”

“You knew, then, that you were welcome at any time.” He leaned forward again, even closer than the had the night before, and his expression was so earnest that Rey’s proverbial hackles lowered just a bit. But she needed more, so she waited.

“I don’t have a place with the Resistance. I won’t. It would have made the ratifications more difficult for everyone, if I had stayed on Chandrila. And… I thought you might need some time. Space.”

‘You don’t know me at all, then,’ she wanted to scream at him. But her gaze was caught by his hands. His fingers were all pinched together, and he was scraping his thumbnails rhythmically against the pads of them, back and forth and back and forth. _He’s nervous_ , Rey realised; and perhaps he was just as clueless as she was, about what they could and might and should be to each other.

“Alright,” Rey said, instead. “Okay. That’s not-- that wasn’t what I would have wanted, though. And, if we’re ever on the same planet again, I would want you to tell me when you’re leaving, and not just leave a note.”

He was drinking in her words obediently, but she could see a defiant glint forming in his eyes.

“But I see your point of view,” Rey continued before he could interrupt. “I could have spoken to you that night if I had wanted to. So I see, what you mean, how you didn’t really leave. I hope you can see my point of view, too?”

A corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re becoming quite the diplomat.”

Rey shrugged self-consciously. “I’ve sat in on a few meetings. But I don’t like politics, so I’ve mostly been doing mech work.”

Ben relaxed, settling his back against the wall, and nodded for her to continue. So Rey kept talking, telling him about her ideas for a new compressor for the Falcon’s hyperdrive (none of them had worked yet), and the fact that Kaydel was going to have a baby (he had met her during the war; they hadn’t gotten along), and the three planters on her windowsill that she was trying to grow herbs in (they sat right above his head, although of course he couldn’t see them).

“Are we friends, then?” she finally asked him. “Is this what we’re going to do?”

He considered for a moment. “I don’t know what we’re meant to be to each other, or how much of this is… organic.” His next inhale shuddered slightly, and she knew he was thinking about Snoke. But his eyes didn’t waver from hers. “I like having you near, and I don’t want to stop.”

Rey didn’t have the heart to point out that she wasn’t near him at all. Earlier that day she had calculated the distance between Chandrila and Naboo. Even the fastest ship would take days to traverse that space.

And yet. He was _here_ , and her fingertips tingled to remind her that he had once been much farther away, and much closer. So she swallowed her objections, and the next night she scooted toward him and sat with her back against the same wall he always appeared in front of -- not quite close enough to touch -- and listened to him explain the finer points of his translation work.

… … ... 

If she had had to guess, in those final days of the war, what the former Supreme Leader would spend his peacetime days doing, she wouldn’t have imagined him holed up in a library on a private island in the Mid Rim. She wouldn’t have expected him to be so interested in astrogation, and the defunct Corellian monarchy, and cell biology. But seeing him appear on the floor every night with a book in his hand and another on his lap (and, once, a smudge of ink right down his forehead) began to feel so right that Rey had trouble parsing exactly why this man had ever imagined himself to be a warrior.

“I always wanted to be a pilot,” he admitted when she asked if he had ever managed to narrow down his frenetic list of interests.

(He wanted to be a pilot. Not a Jedi, or a soldier, or a leader, or a murderer.) “Uh huh. Generally pilots, you know, fly. Have you flown at all, in the last six months?”

Ben lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “There’s nowhere I really want to go, where they wouldn’t recognise my face.”

(He wanted to be a _pilot_. How had it gone so wrong?) “Bit conceited of you, don’t you think? Maybe the trillions of people in the galaxy have more to worry about than your face.”

“Well. If only I didn’t have a disfiguring scar across my cheek to distinguish me, I might be able to blend in more.” He had mentioned the scar before, so Rey knew he wasn’t truly complaining.

(A pilot. It would have been so simple.) “You could cover it up with something. Just, not another helmet, please.”

“How about this: when I was a kid, one of my uncles had a box of sparkly neon bacta patches that he’d put on my knees or elbows when I skinned them. Now that I think about it, he’d sometimes give them to me even when I hadn’t hurt myself. Maybe it was just to annoy my parents.”

(Maybe he’d have flown a shipment to Niima, and Rey might have spotted him across the marketplace, un-helmeted and un-scarred and simple. Just a pilot.) “Oh, yes, a bright pop of colour would definitely improve your visage. Purple would be nice.”

They lapsed into silence then, the way that they always did when parents were mentioned. Ben’s were being brought into conversations with increasing frequency -- always in a casual way, when they were talking carelessly about nothing -- and it occurred to Rey for the first time that he might be doing it on purpose.

“Do you want to talk about them?”

“No,” he said. The reply was both immediate and thoughtful, which confirmed her suspicion that the references were intentional. “Maybe. I wanted you to know that you can talk about them, if you want. You talk about everyone else in your life, and I don’t want you to hold back to spare my feelings.”

Rey leaned away from the wall and twisted her entire body around to face him. “Ben. That’s really brave.”

Ben’s head shook a little. He looked down at his feet, past the arms he crossed over his chest, affecting nonchalance. But she could already see the pink splotches travelling up his neck that betrayed his emotion.

If Rey were in this situation with any other friend, this would be the moment that she reached out to them. Rose would get a hand squeeze; Finn would get a full hug; Snap or Kare might get a playful punch on the shoulder. Even a total stranger might be rewarded with an awkward pat on the back.

But Ben didn’t get anything. If she reached out to him now there were two possible outcomes, each more terrifying than the other. Either she would fail and her hand would pass right through him, or she would make contact and then…

And then: she didn’t know what. So it was best to just smile reassuringly and change the topic.

“Did I tell you about the kitchen, yet? We’re going to paint it orange.”

Ben’s head snapped back up, and the naked disgust on his face made her laugh.

… … …

Sitting on the floor every evening and opening herself to him had become such a fundamental part of Rey’s daily routine -- so easy and natural and necessary -- that she didn’t pause to consider her appearance before contacting him on this occasion.

Ben’s reaction was immediate. He sprang from his cross-legged position into a tense crouch. His lightsaber had appeared in his hand as if from nowhere.

“What happened?”

Rey was waving her arms in vague gestures intended to project the ideas of _calm down_ and _there’s no threat here_ , but Ben obviously wasn’t fluent in the same silent language. She switched to words. “No, it’s fine! Just-- just sit back down. I’m fine. Really.”

“Rey. You’ve been crying. What happened?” His lightsaber creaked as his grip tightened.

She knew what he was seeing -- puffy red eyes and chapped lips and a general air of misery -- but, really, he was over-reacting. “Nothing happened. That’s the annoying thing, you know, nothing actually _happened_. I just had a bad day.” Her vision, in defiance of all logic, began to blur again. “I’m fine. I’m _fine_.”

His body finally began to uncoil, though the concern on his face didn’t lessen. They simultaneously relaxed back against their wall into their usual positions. Rey scrubbed harshly at her eyes and only stopped because she could sense him watching her. She lowered her hands to her lap and worried at the hem of her pants instead. That seemed to satisfy him, and his eyes began to wander over the walls of whatever room he was in, millions of light years away.

“I’m being silly. I have no reason to be sad. It’s just… my compressor idea failed _again_ , and someone was sitting in my usual booth at the diner, and Artoo -- I know he’s a droid, but _geez_ he has no tact at _all_ \-- and then I spilled blue milk everywhere just now, cleaning up after dinner. And none of it means anything at all, and I have nothing to complain or worry about. I’m not thirsty or hungry or windburnt, and so I’m _fine_ , except… it seemed like a lot, at the time.”

Her eyes had dried during her speech, so she took a refreshing breath and closed them. Ben’s hand reached into lap to squeeze her hand. She squeezed back gratefully,

And looked up at him in alarm. “Ben?”

Ben was studying their linked fingers closely. “It’s normal to get upset about nothing, sometimes. I think.”

“Oh,” was all Rey said, because his thumb had started rubbing light circles over her wrist.

“Although… the Wookiees have a saying, about spilt milk, and crying.”

“You’ll have to warn me, if we’re ever on Kashyyyk.”

“Mm-mm, they’d _definitely_ know my face there.”

“We could cover everything with purple patches. Except your eyes.”

“I wouldn’t be able to speak intelligible Shyriiwook with something sticky over my jaw. I’d leave a bad impression.”

“I don’t think they expect humans to speak it, anyway.”

“All the more reason to speak it _perfectly_.”

“Ben?”

“Mm?”

“You’re holding my hand.”

He swallowed. “Would you prefer that I didn’t?”

“I… just wanted to make sure you were… aware.”

“I’m aware.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Ben?”

“Rey.”

“ _How_ are you holding my hand?”

It took him just a little bit too long to reply. “I’m not sure. I wanted to, and then I found that I could.”

Rey rolled this concept over in her mind a few times. “Does that mean that you _always_ could? This whole time?”

“No,” he said, sounding certain. “It changes. I can see what you see. That’s how I know I can touch you.”

That explained why he had been looking around so intently. Rey did a quick inventory of her bedroom, silently cursing the pile of dirty laundry in the corner opposite them. “Oh. Um. Well, welcome?”

His head tipped back to examine the windowsill above him, and the planters that were now overflowing with fragrant green spices. “I like these.”

“Thanks.” Rey lifted her hand from her lap, and his with it, so she could change positions and stretch out her legs. Was her hand sweaty? Could he tell? She didn’t think she had ever maintained physical contact with anyone for such a long time.

“Maybe it’s because I was crying,” she mused out loud. “Do you think? I was crying as well, that first-- the other-- you know, before.”

For the second time Ben seemed reluctant to answer. “I think… I can only touch you when I truly, deeply need to.” He looked away from her, though she didn’t think he was still examining the room. “When the ache becomes unbearable.”

“Right,” Rey croaked around her suddenly-dry throat. “That’s. An interesting theory.”

The silence that followed was awkward, but not painful. Being awkward with Ben was fine. Safe. He never seemed to mind.

“It’s a good theory, actually,” she decided several minutes later. “Maybe it explains why I can never see what you see.”

She didn’t realise that her reply was mysterious until she looked over and could see him working through her words in his mind, trying to decipher her exact meaning.

“No, Ben, I just _meant_ , that you never seem to need comforting. You seem pretty happy, actually. For someone who once aspired to rule the galaxy and has now been demoted to a simple private citizen. Every day, when you show up, you look like you’re… content. With whatever you’re doing.”

He smiled. “Well, you always see the best part of every day.”

… … …

The next month was ordinary, with no hand-holding, but Rey’s impatience was eased when Ben revealed that he was finally satisfied with his translation of the Jedi text.

“It’s a diary,” he explained, turning each page with an almost reverent delicacy. “A very banal one. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t have anything at all to do with the other volumes. There isn’t any information in here that you haven’t already gotten from the others. I hope you’re not disappointed.”

She was, but decided to hide it. “I hope _you’re_ not. You’ve spent six months on this.”

He closed the cover carefully and tucked it away somewhere out of her sight. “It’s fine. I enjoyed the challenge. How was your day?”

“It was fine. We’re planning a trip to Lake Andrasha. Apparently there are flying fish there this time of year.”

Ben confirmed that there were indeed such fish, and that he had seen them as a child. Rey begged him not to say any more about them, so she could witness them for herself. And then she immediately began to ask dozens of questions, because fish and lakes and colours were still quite new to her, and she needed to know how they breathed and how far they could swim and whether or not they truly fly (turns out: no, they don’t). Ben answered every question in thoughtful detail, even while rolling her eyes at how indecisive she was about how much she wanted to know; and Rey marvelled, not for the first time, at how patient he was.

“I suppose I won’t see you, then,” Ben said, after a short pause. “For the few days that you’re away.”

“What? You will. Definitely. I’ll have to share a room with Rose, but I’ll sneak away from the cabin after she’s asleep.” Rey ‘walked’ two of her fingers across the top of her thigh to demonstrate. “We’ll be fine.”

His eyebrows lifted in mock-awe. “A truly devious plan. But, unnecessary. You should focus on enjoying the lake.”

“I will enjoy it. And I’ll enjoy you, too. I don’t want to go a day without seeing you. Because.” She took a deep breath. “I like you; did you know?”

There. She said it. She’d been thinking about saying it for a while now, and had been officially trying to plan it for weeks, since he had spoken of ‘aches’.

Ben blinked a few times. “I know now. Thank you.”

“And you like me.” She powered forward without waiting for a confirmation. “I was worried that we might not. After the war, when we weren’t fighting anymore, and I wasn’t sure if we would ever meet in the Force again like this.”

Ben, she could tell, was trying not to laugh at her. “You were worried that we wouldn’t like each other after we _stopped fighting_?”

“Yes, and--” a small involuntary giggle escaped her “--and _don’t_ make me laugh, you know it’s not as silly as it sounds!”

He kept his mouth tightly shut, but his lips had spread wider than she had ever seen them, and the corners of his eyes crinkled, and--

And suddenly he was bleeding. He looked completely unharmed -- he looked _perfect_ \-- but the edges of him shimmered and spread across the walls of her room, transforming her plain green wallpaper into bookshelves and her shaggy carpet into dark brown wood. The wall against her back became deckled and her pile of laundry (still untouched) grew and transformed into a high-arched window overlooking a moonlit garden.

The change made Rey feel lightheaded because it was so genuinely unanticipated, but her sharply-honed Jedi instinct urged her to press her advantage. No longer giggling, she reached up and forward and tucked Ben’s curls behind his right ear.

It was a striking change that made him look younger and far more vulnerable. Rey traced the shell of his ear, which grew steadily warmer beneath her fingers as the seconds ticked by, and smiled at his wonderstruck expression. She knew what he was thinking, as clearly as if she had forced her way inside his mind. He was thinking that he knew exactly what she must be thinking, because he had experienced this phenomenon himself.

Ben lurched forward. Suddenly his hands were planted on the floor on either side of her hips, and his face was looming above hers hungrily. His hair fell forward to re-cover his ear, and Rey reached up calmly to tuck it back again.

“Do you?” he asked. _Begged_.

“Yeah,” Rey said, more a breath than a word. “I feel it too.” _When I truly, deeply need to. When the ache becomes unbearable._

He touched her, with his forehead against her forehead; and she touched him, with her nose against his nose; and -- did feeling someone’s heart beating against the palm of your hand count as touching? -- there wasn’t time to decide, because lips were touching lips and everything else was falling away.

Rey needed air first, gasping as she broke away from him. His hair was still tucked, but she ran her fingers through it anyway.

“Are there lakes on Naboo?”

“Dozens,” Ben murmured into the angle of her jaw. “Hundreds, maybe,” he told the spot just beneath her ear. “They’re yours.”

A beat of laughter fell from her. “No, I was thinking -- um, that tickles -- I was thinking -- no I didn’t mean you should _stop_ \-- I was thinking I could visit one of them. Instead of Andrasha.”

Ben kissed her lips once more, and pulled back to settle himself back on the floor. “Yes. You definitely should.”

… … …

“This is enough, isn’t it?” Rey released two large handfuls of shrub cuttings onto the table and began to sort through them.

Ben looked up from his book to eye her findings dubiously. “Yes, that is definitely enough plant debris.”

“No, not these.” She swatted at the air as if she were batting away his mistake. “ _This_. You and me. I was worried, once, that it wouldn’t be, but… I can work mech with Rose and do the garden here, and maybe help Leia sometimes. And you can read about--” she leaned forward to see the title of his book-- “fungus, really? That’s fine, I still like you. And... we’ll be okay. We don’t have to worry too much about what we were, or what we could have been. This is enough.”

He had reached out to catch her hand as she was talking, and now he brought it to his lips. This was the part that Ben was really good at. He had a certain knack for taking in all of her wayward thoughts and distilling them until they sounded profound. Rey propped her chin up with her free arm to listen.

He turned her hand over to kiss both sides of her wrist before passing it back to her. 

“Algae aren’t fungus, actually. It’s a common misconception.”

“Right,” Rey said drily. “Yeah. That was my point, the whole time. I’m so glad you picked up on it.”

“Sorry. How about, to make it up to you, I’ll completely take care of dinner. You won’t have to lift a finger.”

Rey rolled her eyes as hard as she possibly could. “That was _barely_ clever the first time, you know.”

Ben, ignoring her, took a small commlink from his pocket and pressed a button that would activate the kitchen droid. “Done. Now you have to forgive me.” He stood and offered her his hand, apparently quite pleased with himself. “Coming?”

It was hard to maintain her expression of long-suffering annoyance when he smiled like that, but Rey thought she managed it well enough. “Yeah. I’m ready.”

**Author's Note:**

> If the pacing is a bit off, it's because I had a lot of trouble resisting the urge to turn this into a multi-chapter slow burn angst-fest. I am who I am.
> 
> Thanks for reading! <3


End file.
